JOIN THE MARKETING REVOLUTION!

I am always on the lookout for great digital analytics tools designed to help you develop your brand position and improve your market share.  One such tool is TubeBuddy.  Designed to analyze YouTube sites, it is a useful strategic marketing tool whether you have a YouTube channel or not.  If your competition uses YouTube, you need to have this marketing tool.

TubeBuddy is free and easy to install.  Simply go to their site [ https://www.tubebuddy.com ], download their software and attach it to your business or personal YouTube site.  Don’t have one, go to YouTube and create a business channel for free.  When you attach TubeBuddy to your business channel on YouTube, that is the one TubeBuddy will use to compare your company to your competitors.

Once you have installed TubeBuddy, you can use it to analyze your site but also ALL OTHER SITES on YouTube…including all of your competitors.  Go to YouTube, search for your competition, go to their site, and click on the TubeBuddy icon.  You can then access a wealth of free, accurate information on any channel.  The graphic above is showing the Red Bull channel.  On every channel you want to analyze, TubeBuddy provides you with these important measures and capabilities:

1. Channel Metrics – On a channel, you can see lifetime and last 30 day metrics on the number of videos and videos. It graphically shows you visits to the sites and, often, can show you the times your prospects are visiting and using YouTube.  Remember, it is the second largest search site after Google.
2. Different Metrics – You can also analyze views in the last 30 days, subscribers in the last 30 days, and new videos added in the last 30 days. It helps you better understand how your competitor’s site is at attracting visitors and followers.
3. Comparison – TubeBuddy will also compare your results to your competition. Useful when you are developing or enhancing your YouTube site.
4. Channel Tags – Finally, and most importantly, you can see their channel tags. Tags are critical to attract new prospects who are searching YouTube for videos to help them address their passions and their immediate needs.  Analyzing tags will show you the important keywords your competitors are targeting and the way they are structuring and using their channels.  More importantly,  you need to include the keyword tags important to you in your YouTube site structure.  Go to your channel, then to settings, then channel settings and add relevant keywords to improve your site’s search effectiveness.
5. Copy & Compare – To make it easy to compare tags against multiple competitors, you can download each competitor’s tags to a CSV file. Aggregate them into an Excel-type spreadsheet to see the tags they each feel are important…and then copy them to your site.

Not only is TubeBuddy useful in analyzing your competition’s channels, you can also learn a great deal from its analysis of each video.  If you click on a video, TubeBuddy displays key metrics about video views and how the audience is reacting.

In addition, Best Practices is a part I use each time I post a video.  For each video you post, it analyzes how you set it up and if there are key areas to improve.  I use this section to see if my videos are correctly formatted for maximum performance.  Often, you or your team will forget to pin comments or do other things that adversely impact the video’s effectiveness.  This free analysis helps avoid that situation.  You don't have to use all of them but I use most of them.

Like channels, you attach tags to each video you add to YouTube; however, unlike the channel tags, these tags show be focused on your organization and the content in the video.  They are detailed and really help searchers find and view your videos so develop them carefully.

When I teach YouTube tags at Northwestern, I tell my students to develop three types of tags for each video.  They are:

1. Company Tags – Add a couple of tags with your company name, brand, or individual. You should also put in the name of people in the video.
2. Topic Tags – Add a number of tags which relate to the major and minor topics in the video. These should be keywords of interest to your community.  These tags also “cover” the tags used by your competitors for those topics.
3. Detail Tags – These are tags about the deeper information in the video. Specific products mentioned, specific methodologies or special terms.  Some of your market will want to search using these specific detailed tags.

Like your channel analysis, you can download the results from any video your competitor posts.

3 Action Items

To best get started with TubeBuddy, here are three action items I recommend you do:

1. Check All Your Competitor Channels
   Go to each of your competitor’s YouTube channels and explore their performance and examine the channel tags they are using. Also, look at the playlists they are using to structure their content.  Download their channel tags to compare with your other competitors.
2. Check Important Videos
   You competitors have videos which discuss their products and services or compare them to your offerings. Look at each of these videos with TubeBuddy to see their performance and the tags they are using to attract searchers.  Copy these tags as well to use in developing your future video efforts.
3. Make Important Changes to your Site
   Finally, use your findings to improve your channel as well as to determine the best video tags to use with each video you create. Remember to create company, topic and detail tags to maximize your site for search activities.

TubeBuddy is a great free tool designed to give you critical competitor information you can immediately use to better position your videos.  It is also a great way to look at each of your new video offerings to ensure they are set up for maximum effectiveness.  Every time I create a new video, I examine it to ensure it will have maximum impact in my target markets.  You should too.  Enjoy!